Kids Count report gives top rating to Mass. education

Nazen Espinal, 8, works on a reading assignment with teacher Jillian Camilleri at Woodland Academy's summer school in Worcester on Wednesday.

WORCESTER — Tuesday morning, teacher Lilian Momanyi was working on the poem "Three Little Kittens" with kindergarten and first-grade students. They acted it out with cut-out mittens, recited it as a group, and went over rhyming sounds.

"Rhyming words are like family words," one student said.

"Do you hear the same sounds at the end?" Ms. Momanyi asked them. She repeated "kittens" and "mittens," pointing first to one of her ears and then to the other.

Many of the 12 enthusiastic students in front of her speak English as a second language; none of the 60 elementary school students in Woodland Academy's summer program is monolingual, said Principal Patricia E. Padilla. (That figure does not include five young students with cochlear implants who are in a specialized program.)

Similar summer school programs were happening elsewhere in the city, including math classes at North High School for middle and high school students. On Wednesday, middle school students led by Mary Ryder, a math teacher at Worcester East Middle School, learned the Pythagorean theorem by drawing triangles on graph paper and a square along each side of the triangle that demonstrated how the sum of the squares of a triangle's two legs really do equal the square of the triangle's longest side.

Ms. Ryder is also working on exponents in general. "Some of the kids had no idea what they were," she said.

The summer programs are an attempt to bring struggling students to grade-level proficiency and keep them there. It isn't easy in Worcester or in Massachusetts or in the nation, as a recent report by the Maryland-based Annie E. Casey Foundation found.

The foundation's most recent Kids Count report, which was released June 24 and tracks indicators of children's well-being, ranked Massachusetts first in the nation for education. This wasn't a big surprise, because two of the report's four education categories were tied to previously released National Assessment of Educational Progress scores on which Massachusetts was highest in the nation.

But while no state did better, Massachusetts' scores that year weren't really bragging rights. The report found that 50 percent of Massachusetts fourth-graders were not proficient in reading in 2011, and 49 percent of its eighth graders were not proficient in math that year.

"When you go back several decades, what's disheartening is that there hasn't been that much improvement," said Laura Speer, associate director for policy reform and data at the Casey Foundation. "Most of the improvement that's happened has happened over the last decade. It does say something about the fact that if we actually really focus on these kinds of outcomes, we can make a difference … It's not an impossible task."

But, she added, there are still wide variations in student achievement among students of different income levels.

Mitchell D. Chester, Massachusetts commissioner of elementary and secondary education, said of the scores and ranking, "We should be quite proud but not complacent."

He believes not enough children are taught high-quality curriculum by a high-quality teacher, something he hopes will be addressed by newly updated state frameworks, which include the Common Core, and new teacher and principal evaluation systems.

"We know that there's great unevenness," Mr. Chester said. "Some of our students are receiving a world-class program of study … but some of our students are not."

At the local level, challenges also include money. Summer school spaces in Worcester, for instance, are allotted according to available funding. At Woodland, there was enough money for approximately 60 students, even though most of the school's 523 students are not at grade level.

Yuisa Perez Chionchio, the district's director of supplemental academic programs and services, said grants fund the bulk of summer school programs. The amount of money available determines how many children they can serve. "It's a budget issue, not a need issue," she said.

That said, not every student who is eligible can make it. Some spend the summer with grandparents in a different country, while others have working parents who can't pick their son or daughter up at noontime, Mrs. Padilla noted.

Test scores were two of the four factors the Casey Foundation considered in its education ranking. The others were the percentage of children not attending preschool (41 percent in Massachusetts for 2009-2011) and students not graduating from high school on time (17 percent in Massachusetts for 2009-10). All four factors had improved since 2005 in both Massachusetts and the nation.

"It's good that we've seen some progress, but the progress has been slow," said Noah Berger, president of the Massachusetts Budget and Policy Center, which is a local partner of the Casey Foundation for Kids Count. He said a well-educated workforce is simply good for the state economy, and he is in favor of measures that will benefit children and young families, such as jobs for young adults, a higher minimum wage and affordable, high-quality child care.